Thanks for trying out 0 A.D. and coming here to report your problem. As the game is still in alpha releases there are still many things we need to do. Many of these we know already, so when you provide feedback we would ask you to focus on some of the other points that could be improved.

LagThis is a common complaint, and with good reason. The game does not run as fast as we would like. Late in the game you will probably experience some lag, this is caused by a mixture of things, AI and pathfinding are big ones. The problem is worse on island maps and with multiple AI players.

One thing that can be helpful is giving us the profiler information. This automatically generated information is useful for working out where the lag is coming from. If you hit Shift-F11 this will be dumped into a file (location given at the top of the screen). Please upload these data to our forums to help us solve the problem. Thanks!

Missing AnimationsSome units glide around or don't drop to the ground when killed. We have an animator who is working away at making pretty animations. More animators are invited to help with this task.

Units Can't Attack When ChasingThere is a problem in the code where units decide to attack, then the chased enemy gets out of range before the attack hits so it is aborted, so in effect any units chasing each other won't be able to deal damage.

Greyed out/disabled menu itemsSome menu items can't be clicked on, this is because those features aren't yet implemented.

Units don't fight in formation

Units aren't in formationFormations have been disabled for the Alpha 17 release, but will be re-enabled in the future.

Can't run two instances of the game simultaneously on Windows

Multiplayer Lobby

No one can join my game!Currently, only routers with UPnP support or routers that have been properly port fowarded are able to host.

I was disconnected from the lobby...This is usually caused by the timeout mentioned in the issue above or by a moderator kicking you for abusive behaivor or inappropriate/vulgar chats.

AI Problems

AI tries to gather from resources near your base

AI Doesn't Know how to Fight using Ships

There may be errors loading a saved game with AIs. Rejoining a multiplayer game with AIs is not supported yet.

Common Suggestions

"You should use multiple threads/cores" 0 A.D. does have multiple threads for e.g. texture conversion, sound/music playback and user data reporting, but the game simulation and renderer currently run in the main thread to simplify development. A complete redesign would be too complex, but some of the simulation (pathfinder and AI) is designed to use worker threads in the future.

"You should use Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc."We did try to do an Indiegogo campaign, but while we did raise some money which will go towards improving the game, we did not raise as much as we had hoped. The goal was to raise enough to hire two developers full time for two years, but we did not reach it so we have not been able to hire them. We do hope to be able to for example hire one of the programmers during the summer.

I think this should be restructured into a sort of FAQ list, with concerns in order of importance/frequency. The question should be in layman's terms. Some examples:

Q: The game is slow or lagging, what can I do?A: The game does not run as fast as we would like. Late in the game you will probably experience some lag, this is caused by a mixture of things, AI and pathfinding are big ones. One thing that can be helpful is giving us the profiler information, if you hit Shift-F11 this will be dumped into a file (location given at the top of the screen), the contents of which are useful for working out where the lag is coming from so please upload.

Q: I have a fast computer with multiple cores and a fancy graphics card, so why is the game still slow?A: Currently most of the game engine is single threaded and so unable to take advantage of multiple cores. Eventually the more intensive parts of the game such as AI and pathfinding will be multi-threaded. The limiting factor on the game's speed is typically the processor, rather than the graphics card (since the game is designed to work even with older computers).

Q: I see visual glitches, textures not loaded, etc.A: Sometimes this is a driver problem, make sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card. If you have a custom build of the game, textures might be slow to cache, during which time they will appear grey. Otherwise submit a bug report with as much info as possible including screenshots.

Q: The game has an error or crashes, what can I do?A: Report the error and provide as much information as possible. Unfortunately there are many possible causes of crashes and the game's error messages are not always sufficient. Please provide steps to reproduce the problem, if possible, and post relevant parts of the logs (interestinglog.html) and crash dumps if available.

Q: Islands and water maps are very slow.A: AIs don't really support water maps currently, so try playing water maps against human players or else playing a land map against AIs.

Q: There's no sound on OS X.A: Sound is currently disabled on OS X due to errors in our sound implementation.

Q: Sound is choppy, sometimes I don't hear music.A: The game's sound system is currently very buggy and will be redesigned.

Q: Units appear to glide around or don't have proper animations.A: Some animations are still missing, we have someone who is working on animal animations.

It could even be split into sections, like "Performance", "Gameplay", "Graphics", "Sound", "Crashes/Errors".

I think this should be restructured into a sort of FAQ list, with concerns in order of importance/frequency. The question should be in layman's terms. Some examples:

I'm not sure about this. I think it might be trying to merge two separate things into one. The known issues list should be easy to edit so new items are added quickly. The FAQ would give more useful information about how people should report problems and possible fixes.

Hmm, I wonder if it's possible to have the same topic stickied to every forum (and still be just one topic I mean), will have to take a look at the admin interface...

I couldn't find anything relevant, but I've added a link to this topic to most forum rules (i.e. the optional area above the individual forum), so it should at least be a bit better. Could still be a bit more obvious though, but perhaps that's something to think about when working on the theme for the new version

I think you can make an announcement through the admin cp I think, which should put it in all forums.

Hmm, didn't find anything called announcements, but there is a feature called board guidelines which places a link to either a specific page with the content you set up or to a link, I've set it to link to this topic. It could be a bit more obvious, but it's at least close to the "View New Content" button so users who are aware of that should see it =) Now I would guess most people who have used the forums enough to be aware of that are aware of either this topic or have seen the questions asked/answered in other places, but at least it's there I'll let the other links remain until after the forum upgrade, then we could style the "board guidelines" link to make it more obvious